WATCHDOG

Send us your investigative news tips

The review found that 26 ballots have been cast in the names of 10 dead San Diego County citizens since 1998.

Mail-in ballots were the most common way to vote in the name of a deceased person, accounting for 21 of the votes in question — and all the votes cast for DeGregory and Welty.

The election in which the most posthumous votes were cast was in November 2012. Six votes were cast in the name of the deceased that round, twice as many as in the next-closest election.

“Every second of the day, people are dying, people are moving, people are turning 18, and there’s always going to be lag time updating the voter rolls,” said Michael Vu, who heads the county’s Registrar of Voters.

When it comes to disqualifying voters, Vu said his office faces a “huge balancing act between being overly aggressive and removing voters off the rolls and disenfranchising them.”

The National Voter Registration Act of 1993 limits the circumstances under which states can remove voters from the rolls. In California, voters can cancel their own registration with a written request to election officials, but disqualification initiated by the registrar is more complicated.

If Vu’s office receives an official death record from the county’s Office of Vital Records and Statistics, it can remove voters without running afoul of state or federal law. In the absence of that record, Vu can only refer suspicious cases to the District Attorney’s Office or the Secretary of State for further review.

“If there’s information that comes to us in that light, we would refer it to proper law enforcement,” Vu said.

The U-T compared a national Social Security death database with local voter rolls to look for matches. An initial set of 100 close matches was winnowed to 10 confirmed cases of voters shown in records as voting after they died.

All 10 were still listed as eligible voters in county records as of May, which is when the data was captured.

More instances of after-death votes may exist, especially for deaths after 2011. In that year, the Social Security Administration began excluding information about the location of deaths in its publicly available data, limiting its usefulness.